Introduction

This chapter introduces the works of the contributors in the volume. It is organized by common themes that run through each of the papers as a way of showing the far-reaching scope of environmental political theory (EPT), and include discussions of the ruling class as earthly gods who squander surplus energy in disastrous ways, how zones of extraction become zones of destruction, and the total inadequacy of already-existing policy frameworks to the existential environmental challenges in the current context. This introduces the works as exploring some of the boundaries of EPT in a growing field of political economies of energy and extraction.